The purpose of this study was to understand the organizational level decision factors in technology adoption in the context of digital libraries. A qualitative case study approach was used to investigate the adoption of a specific technology, XML-based Web services, in digital libraries. Rogers' diffusion of innovations and Wenger's communities of…

In September 2015, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) awarded the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) a grant to investigate the early impacts of the National Digital Stewardship Residency (NDSR) programs, in order to inform subsequent development of similar programs by others with a vested interest in building…

Considering learning and how to improve students' performances, an adaptive educational system must know how an individual learns best. In this context, this work presents an innovative approach for student modeling through probabilistic learning styles combination. Experiments have shown that our approach is able to automatically detect and…

The construction industry is a knowledge intensive industry. Thousands of documents are generated by construction projects. Documents, as information carriers, must be managed effectively to ensure successful project management. The fact that a single project can produce thousands of documents and that a lot of the documents are generated in a…

The recent White House (2011) policy paper for the Smart Grid that was released on June 13, 2011, "A Policy Framework for the 21st Century Grid: Enabling Our Secure Energy Future," defines four major problems to be solved and the one that is addressed in this dissertation is Securing the Grid. Securing the Grid is referred to as one of…

As Web 2.0 applications become increasingly popular, more and more people express their opinions on the Web in various ways in real time. Such wide coverage of topics and abundance of users make the Web an extremely valuable source for mining people's opinions about all kinds of topics. However, since the opinions are usually expressed as…

Purpose: The "advanced loans" module of the relatively new library software, ABCD, is an addition to the normal loans module and it offers a "generic transaction decision-making engine" functionality. The module requires extra installation effort and parameterisation, so this article aims to explain to the many potentially interested libraries,…

Item response theory parameters have to be estimated, and because of the estimation process, they do have uncertainty in them. In most large-scale testing programs, the parameters are stored in item banks, and automated test assembly algorithms are applied to assemble operational test forms. These algorithms treat item parameters as fixed values,…

A system was developed for automatic generation of problems and solutions for examinations in a university distance course in discrete mathematics and tested in a pilot experiment involving 200 students. Considering the success of such systems in the past, particularly including automatic assessment, it should not take long before such systems are…

Automated writing evaluation (AWE) systems can provide immediate computer-generated quantitative assessments and qualitative diagnostic feedback on an enormous number of submitted essays. However, limited research attention has been paid to locally designed AWE systems used in English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom contexts. This study…

The present paper proposes and evaluates a readability assessment method designed for Japanese learners of EFL (English as a foreign language). The proposed readability assessment method is constructed by a regression algorithm using a new set of linguistic features that were employed separately in previous studies. The results showed that the…

Purpose: Mashups have been studied extensively in the literature; nevertheless, the large body of work in this area focuses on service/data level integration and leaves UI level integration, hence UI mashups, almost unexplored. The latter generates digital environments in which participating sources exist as individual entities; member…

Conversational agents that draw on the framework of academically productive talk (APT) have been lately shown to be effective in helping learners sustain productive forms of peer dialogue in diverse learning settings. Yet, literature suggests that more research is required on how learners respond to and benefit from such flexible agents in order…

Growing reliance on complex constructed response items has generated considerable interest in automated scoring solutions. Many of these solutions are described in the literature; however, relatively few studies have been published that "compare" automated scoring strategies. Here, comparisons are made among five strategies for…

Whether you have an interest in starting an ebook collection for your school library program or are working on enhancing an ebook collection you've already established, this handbook is for you. The world of ebooks is both vast and intricate. Exploring the many articles concerning ebook publication, vendors, devices, and copyright laws can be…